Management made that decision. We have people who thought that it wasn't the best way to spend money. It made perfect sense to me. The people who had them now have a 2.4GHz dual core with 4GB of RAM and all they do is sign in and launch Citrix and launch their apps. :roflsquared: Other than Office apps they use everything in Citrix.

I wasn't on this team when management made that decision or else I would have tried to make an argument to reassess it. I was still supporting desktops then. As it is now we have no reason to have 11,000 desktops. We could most likely be down to 1,000-2,000 desktops top with the rest being thin clients.

So do you support the Citrix apps at your work or does someone else? I rarely get to talk to someone that works with Citrix a lot.

I do a little bit with the citrix, but mostly just adding apps to the access essentials. I mostly do work with firewalls and network audits and now possibly planning a thin client deployment.

http://www.brianmadden.com

There are some good resources on there to read up on. I went to one of his classes in NYC last year. He is extremely knowledgeable about Citrix and virtualization.

Thanks I'll have to check that out. I'm going to some Enterasys training in March, I'm sure I can talking him into springing fomr some more classes.

How about USB troubleshooting?

USB has worked out a lot better than I thought it would back when it came out. It's very functional and usually works without any effort. However, when it breaks, what can I do? With serial and parallel ports, you could specify the port, memory address, and IRQ and then stuff had to work. With USB, WTF!

I've got two users with wonky USB printer connections. It will work then die randomly. No error is displayed on the printer, and if you unplug it then plug it into a different USB port it works.

buy a new computer and a new printer, should fix any issues :crazy:

kick it, thats what I always do but it never seems to solve the problem for some reason

I'm not sure, but my users might think less of me if I kick their computers...

Maybe if I punch the computer just right, though.
http://digilander.libero.it/happyday...box/fonzie.jpg

eyyyyyyyyy

I need a small portable program that's good for copying lots of files without giving me any bullshit. I would use it to copy whole hard drives or large folders, such as when replacing a user's computer and moving their profile to the new one.

Windows' normal copy will ask you repeatedly if you're sure you want to copy read only / hidden / system files and if you want to overwrite stuff and so on, then if it has a problem copying one file it aborts the whole operation.

Karen's Replicator does a really great job -- it copies everything it can without giving me any lip, has exclusion list functionality with a built-in filter for temp files, does a great job totalling the results, and gives you a good log of what it's done so you know what files it couldn't copy. However, it is not portable - you're supposed to install it before you can use it (though it CAN be used portably); but more importantly it requires a bunch of work before you can start copying. You have to wade through dialogs 3 or 4 levels deep to setup a job, save it, schedule (or not) it, and then finally run it.

I'm thinking either something like Karen's Replicator with a simpler front-end that lets me just get on with working (and more portable), or something that looks like Windows Explorer (or Windows 3.1 File Manager, or Norton Commander, or mc, etc) and does the job.

Any suggestions?

Ok, found one that's ugly but claims to be exactly what I want...
http://www.ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en

robocopy is pretty badass but not sure if its portable

Robocopy works great. you could put the resource kit on a thumb drive and just install it to the local computer.

true dat

I know this has got to be a stupid question, but...
I could swear that there's a checkbox / dialog to configure Windows to automatically update its time via NTP, and you could set it to query Microsoft or NIST or whatever. I can't find it on my XP desktop or on my Server 2008 domain controllers/servers!

My brain must be seriously fried today. Now I can't remember how I would loop-mount an NTFS image in Windows. I know I've done it a million times.

I think an update removed that option, but you can configure a GPO to sync domain computers time with you PDC or whatever time server you pick.

That would be a lame update. Why would they do that? :(

I think it was something to do with microsoft taking down their time servers but I'm not 100% on that.

Anybody have any recommendations on a free or cheap classroom managment software that will work on both windows and linux?

http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/23/cre...th-courseforum
I don't know if it's any good or even really what it does, but I read ghacks daily and saw it.

There's an open-source alternative to WebCT that my director has talked about, but I don't remember what it's called.

Yes.

I've got two users' Vista laptops that are running awfully slow, and I can't find anything wrong with them...other than the fact that they're running Vista. WTF.

How old are thye, how long hav eyou had them? What cleaning programs do you have on the laptops?

One appears to be pretty new, the other is old and beat-up. On the newer one I ran Spybot and CCleaner, and manually checked stuff like processes/services that are running and internet explorer add-ons. The older one came in shortly before I posted that and I've been struggling just to get it in a condition to download some programs, its CD-ROM drive is busted and I'm too lazy to use a USB drive...